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Yesterday I was lucky enough to take a personal tour of the Aston Martin headquarters. My dad managed to persuade a contact at the Gaydon-based facility into showing us round the showroom and the inner workings of the factory. It was a great experience, and one that aptly demonstrates how complex physical manufacturing (in comparison to coding software), with real-world limitations, can be.

The first stop, the showroom, was probably my favorite part of the tour. I got to sit in my new, all-time dream car - the DBS, as seen in Casino Royale. Couldn’t take my eyes off it. It’s the best looking car I’ve ever seen, and sitting in the driving seat gave me the biggest, stupidest grin imaginable. The sales team have chosen to present the vehicle in an ebony exterior & interior, and it looked awesome (possibly even better than the silver model sat in the car park!). And so it should for a £165k car with a two year waiting list!

Unfortunately, we weren’t allowed to take any pictures of the manufacturing process, but we saw the following;

• The V8, DB9 and DBS models going from aluminium frames to road-worthy vehicles
• A custom-ordered bright yellow DB9 in the middle of the production cycle (why would you do that?! Surely any sane person would choose luminous green with an orange interior…)
• A real customer taking a tour of the factory, prior to their dream car purchase (apparently they only do two tours a day, so I must be a lucky guy)!
• The engineer who manages the DBS custom line and built the cars for Casino Royale movie (watching the car being destroyed in the movie must’ve been a little painful)

The factory tour gave me a real appreciation for the complexity involved in constructing a manufacturing plant at the same time as planning a new manufacturing process for upcoming AM models (the HQ is only a few years old, and the kind person that gave us the tour was responsible for the project management). Every nut, bolt, foam pad, and custom-ordered interior colour stitching, has to be accounted for - alongside the management of health & safety restrictions, planning for expansion, and managing the flow of the production line - before you can construct a building to house all of these processes….It makes websites look easy!